Real ID Gets worse

If your name is John Smith, you may not think this is so bad. The chance of anyone connecting the Blizzard forum posting John Smith to you is pretty low.

But if your name is Dena Anschwelter, or Lyndon Frellingham, you might see the problem. I used to be a lot less concerned about my real name online; my name was basically the same level of common as, say, Jennifer Brown. But then I got married and it changed to being an absolutely unique id; nobody else has the same first and last name as me. Nobody has the same first and last name as my husband. 50% of online references to [our last name] are us or our immediate family. All of a sudden I got a lot more paranoid.

I have my facebook settings locked so nobody but my friends can see my stuff, and I don’t post things I don’t want getting out. So this change really bothers me. Not that I troll on forums, but that there is a gaming stigma in real life, and I don’t really want people like prospective employers (I am working on being a freelance programmer) seeing that I’m into WoW. I’m just not ok with that, and Blizzard should be more sensitive to me.

There’s a lot of ways to get their stated desires – less trolling, less anonymous idiocy – without using real names.

This had better not be retroactive. I won’t be posting on Blizzard’s forums ever again.

Which means the next time something happens like, say, an official discussion of whether I like Tree Form or not, that affects my class later on, my voice won’t be heard.

17 Responses

I’m glad this isn’t retroactive, but it is bad enough that I won’t be posting on official forums ever again either. Like you, I have a very uncommon last name. My first name is less uncommon but is spelled differently than the typical spelling. Put the two together and yeah, Google my name and you find only me.

When people think nothing of rolling an alt to go harass someone on another server, it just seems to me that there’s not any more effort involved in someone getting a work number or email and moving harassment to real life.

And if anyone wants to call me paranoid about this, they better not be a dude named Matt Jones or I’ll likely break something.

Exactly. Anyone doing a search on my name will find me. Period. To the best of my knowledge there is only one person with my name on the planet. Despite how big the internet is there are a LOT of people who are in the same boat. Even if there is more than one with that name the other one probably is not as ‘googleable’ as a wow addict. I mean if some 87 year old guy in Lybia had my name somehow it is unlikely that a google search would find him instead of me. The same goes for lots of folks. What is more, it is possible to find just about everything about someone from a few internet searches. I found my home address one time. Scary stuff. What the heck is Bliz thinking.

I’m not a fan of the official forums, but I still think this is a bad idea. All I ever post is the occasional bump of my guild’s recruitment threads, but now I won’t even do that. I also have a unique name and I don’t feel the need to share it with everyone.

Yeah, I just tried and the dozen results that came up when I googled my name were ALL me, just like the last time I checked. Although I think they mostly point at the last place I lived – heh – so as long as I move every two years or so I probably don’t need to worry about stalkers too much.

I am really not a fan of this, for many reasons. I don’t like RealID because of the lack of privacy and customization (why can’t we use a handle of our own choosing?), and I don’t like this new announcement because there isn’t even a choice this time. But what I really don’t like is the implications of where this could go. Battle.net used to be voluntary too, until Blizz said “You must make a battle.net account or you can’t log into WoW any more.” RealID started out voluntary, now it’s a little less voluntary (you can opt to not post on the forums, but still). What next?

My name is pretty damn common (think Jane Jones of Romania), but I still don’t have any intention of letting the internet know it. Thankfully, my personal blog stopped showing up as the first result on Google, but I spent years telling people that no, they may not put my real name on articles I write (of course, someone did). At some point my dad managed to find my personal blog, so I pretty much stopped writing there.

On a related note, my nationality is very obvious (to other Romanians), and 90% of the Romanians I met on my server are either very dumb or very rude. I don’t want all these people to know my nationality, period. I am embarrassed when they start being “funny” and start swearing in Romanian on General, telling people to suck their dicks because of a football game 😐 Just… no.